"For God's sake, give a man a chance," Walker begged, as his captors lashed him to a fence post. "I killed Rice in self-defense. Don't give me a crooked death because I'm not white." It had rained the night before so finding the fuel for a bonfire proved difficult, but volunteers who entered a nearby barn found and removed arm loads of hay and straw, and added it to some dry chestnut fence rails they'd come upon. The wood and other flammable materials were stacked around Walker's feet and oil was poured over him."

If you've read Philip Dray's At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America -- which I am excerpting here -- you spent several restless nights with an utterly unsparing account of the terrorist campaign against black Americans that raged in the aftermath of the Civil War and well into the 1940s.

By now word of Walker's abduction had reached the townspeople back at the bottom of the hill, and a crowd surged uphill to the site of the burning. According to the West Chester Daily Local News, "5,000 men, women and children stood by and watched the proceedings as though it were a ball game or another variety of outdoor sport." The Coatesville Record noted: "Everything was quiet and orderly around the fire, if such a thing can be said of a lynching. There was no loud talking, no profanity, and the utmost deference shown to the hundreds of women who came to the scene. Men stepped back as the women came forward and led them to points of vantage where they could obtain the best view of the burning Negro."

And if you are curious, or tormented, about the dimensions of this national tragedy, I would highly recommend that you skip Incognegro -- a new graphic novel from Vertigo, written by Mat Johnson with art by Warren Pleece -- and, instead, spend the weekend with Dray.

When Walker, in supreme agony, tried to escape the flames, the mob drove him back with pitchforks and fence rails. As in Southern lynchings, many participants remained in the area waiting for the fire to cool, then advanced with pliers, knives, and other implements to secure fingers and toes as souvenirs. Another large contingent adjourned back down the hill for soft drinks and dessert at the Coatsville Candy Company. Concluded the next day's newspaper: "Not in the history of the town has there been so much excitement in Coatesville."

It may seem unfair to compare this graphic novel to a book David Levering Lewis called "the most comprehensive social history of this shameful subject in almost seventy years." But Johnson -- a writing professor at the University of Houston and a recipient of the USA James Baldwin Fellowship for Literature -- isn't breaking new ground with Incognegro. And if you are familiar with the terrain, Johnson's passage over this scorched earth is disarmingly flat.

"I grew up a black boy who looked white," Johnson says in an author's note. "Along with my cousin (half black/half Jewish), I started fantasizing about living in another time, another situation, where my ethnic appearance would be an asset instead of a burden. We would "go incognegro," we told ourselves as we ran around, pretending to be race spies in the war against white supremacy."

In college, Johnson continues, he began reading about "Walter White, the former head of the NAACP. White was an African-American even paler than I was. In the early 20th century, White went undercover, posing as a white man in the deep south to investigate lynchings."

Filling White's role in Incognegro is Zane Pinchback, who writes for the New Holland Herald in Harlem. He has long wearied of covering the lynchings, and not getting his due as a columnist, but agrees to make one final swing through the South when his brother, who makes the best moonshine in Mississippi, is arrested in Tupelo for the murder of a white woman.

Incognegro is framed by two lynchings, neither of which are captured as vividly as Dray details the 1911 immolation of Zachariah Walker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. (Lynching? A strictly Southern phenomenon? Think again.) The inhumanity inflicted on black Americans "at the hands of persons unknown" is so savage in Dray's book that it cries, almost a century later, for an unsparing Vertigo salute. Mat Johnson isn't nearly as successful in taking his readers in for that unforgettable close-up.

To gain access to his brother's cell, Pinchback must masquerade as a Klansman for the local sheriff; it's one of several clumsy plot contrivances that detract from the tale. Identity is either so amorphous in Tupelo -- or the locals so near-sighted and thick-skulled -- that even the leader of the racist lynch mob must guard against being mistaken for an uppity Negro.

I don't mean to suggest that Incognegro is a failure or a waste of time. Far from it. Johnson and Vertigo make a noble attempt to bring a new generation of readers up to speed on a terrible era in race relations in this country. But unless you are a fan of Pleece's art -- and I'm not -- the graphic novel's execution can't compete with its vaunted intentions. And when the subject is as serious as this one, the sense of disappointment rises accordingly.

Outside the town, the lynching was an immediate scandal, the stuff of countless editorials and sermons. Pennsylvania had long been regarded as a bastion of Republican-style patriotism, the home of Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Franklin, the Liberty Bell, and the hallowed ground of Gettsburg. The area around Coatesville itself had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and there were still towns nearby that were considered Quaker enclaves. That such an event could occur where it had was deeply shocking, and residents were further stunned when a photograph of Walker's remains -- a blackened and twisted form that was barely recognizable as having once been a human being -- was circulated and published along with some of the more outrageous articles.